Decisions on pricing are almost among the toughest ones facing business executives. The question most often asked in discussions about pricing is “How real are those price pressures?” If they reflect fundamental market forces, price increases can translate into lost business and a serious erosion in market share. If they involve posturing and negotiation tactics alone, price increases can remove a lot of the pressure on the coming year’s annual plan.

Business executives got a clear message recently on the importance of this topic, when Warren Buffet told the Financial Crisis Committee: “The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business".

The webinar will address four principal themes, with explicit action insights and case study examples used to illustrate each of them:

Price is always a factor, but not always the only factor driving purchase decisions. Knowing where you are on the bulls-eye, or not, can allow you to respond appropriately to pricing pressures from competitors and customers.

Understanding the pricing environment can help you be proactive and make appropriate pricing decisions. Knowing whether pricing pressures are real and unavoidable, or not, often defines the line between those companies that will survive and thrive, and those that will not. A new approach to pricing analytics can help to determine if price pressures are real or not.

Best practice approaches to pricing, including “solutions” strategies and approaches that create upside potential without risking the loss of business, can allow improved price realization even in challenging business environments.

Long-term wins involve a focus on the factors that create value for customers. A proactive approach can enable you to get ahead of the vicious cycle of price-based competition.

Successful pricing strategies, as addressed in this webinar, can yield two significant contributions:

Improve price realization, yielding a meaningful improvement that drops directly to the bottom line

Put into place appropriate segment-specific foundations for sustained success, positioned to create value for customers and avoid commoditization of products and services

Learning Objectives:

Assessing the severity of price pressures and the appropriate response to them

Identifying the factors that determine the severity of pricing pressures

Building a dashboard to track price pressures across lines of business and over time

Implementing creative approaches to pricing that can yield upside gains

How to avoid the vicious cycle of price-based competition

How to refocus efforts on the basics: creating value in order to capture value